People often express concerns that eating off of wood is "unhygienic," and perhaps even dangerous. I will restrain myself from ranting about how industrialized, commercialized, and commodified culture has turned nature into an evil villain bent on poisoning humanity. Instead, I'll refer you to the work of Dean O. Cliver, a UC Davis prof who compared bacterial survival on wooden cutting boards to bacterial survival on plastic. Guess what? Wood won. Here's a pdf of the article (nana-tech follows): If you look around the web, you'll find other articles extolling the virtues of various . . .